Tag Archives: Taxes

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CBO report predicts 30% higher taxes and trillion-plus dollar deficit

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published today by the CBO.

At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes.

“In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent,” said CBO, “mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect.”

The U.S. economy, CBO projects, will perform “below its potential” for another six years and unemployment will remain above 7 percent for another three.

Fox News reports that the deficit will remain above 1 trillion dollars.

Excerpt:

A new budget report released Tuesday predicts the U.S. government will run a $1.1 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ends in September, the fourth year in a row over $1 trillion, though a slight dip from last year.

[…]The report is yet another reminder of the perilous fiscal situation the government is in, but it is commonly assumed that President Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress that little will be accomplished on the deficit issue during an election year.

[…]”Four straight years of trillion-dollar deficits, no credible plan to lift the crushing burden of debt,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican. “The president and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges.”

“We will not solve this problem unless both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are willing to move off their fixed positions and find common ground,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat. “Republicans must be willing to put [tax increases] on the table.”

The study also predicts modest economic growth of 2 percent this year and forecasts that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent this year and next. That is based on an assumption that President Barack Obama will fail to win renewal of payroll tax cuts and jobless benefits by the end of next month.

That jobless rate is higher than the rates that contributed to losses by Presidents Jimmy Carter (7.5 percent) and George H.W. Bush (7.4 percent). The study predicts unemployment to remain above roughly 5 percent — until 2016. The agency also predicts that unemployment will remain at 7 percent or above through 2015

Deficits in 2007 under George W. Bush were $160 billion and the unemployment rate was around 4-5%.

The CBO report also shows that the real unemployment rate is 10%.

Videos

Paul Ryan takes Obama’s State of the Union speech apart

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Budget hawk Paul Ryan on Fox News Sunday.

Snippet 1:

“The irony of this is the president’s policies do the exact opposite.  We basically have this. The president can’t run on his record. It’s a miserable record. He is not going to change his tune and moderate like say Bill Clinton did in 1996 because he’s really stuck with his ideology so he has no choice but to divide. So he is going to run a very decisive campaign for political gain and he has this concept of fairness and equality where he uses the kind of rhetoric we use, but the policies he’s producing will result in crony capitalism will result in more power in the government to supervise our lives, to give us a stagnant economy where the rich and the powerful are the ones who are picking it. So what I’m trying to say is he is giving us a future of debt, doubt, and decline. “

And snippet 2:

“The president isn’t leading. The president isn’t truthful with the American people about what kind of fiscal train wreck is coming, we’re going to be. And we’ll pass budgets to show the country exactly how we propose to fix the problem. You know the thing that is frustrating about this, Chris, is there is an emerging bipartisan census on fixing these big problems. There are Democrats who do agree with us on how to do tax reform. Get the loopholes out, lower the rates. We’re getting a bipartisan consensus on Medicare reform. The problem is the president and his party leader are out on the left standing on the sidelines looking in. So what we clearly need is a new White House and a new Senate and then we can realize this emerging bipartisan consensus on how to fix these problems”.

It’s good that we have Paul Ryan to respond to Obama’s rhetoric.

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News

36 Obama aides owe $833,000 to IRS, federal employees owe $3.4 billion

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Because how unfair — indeed, un-American — it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet’s secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.

Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven’t paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama’s White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year.

[…]The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That’s up 3% in the past year.

Democrats are actually quite hypocritical. They say one thing in public, in order to give the appearance of being generous and compassion, but in private they do something completely different. I wrote more about hypocrisy on the left in this post.